Asean must take a strong and united stand on the Rohingya crisis

THE grim discovery this week of mass graves near the Thai border in Malaysia has lent a poignant urgency to the 15-nation summit in Bangkok on Friday on the Rohingya crisis.

An emergency meeting in Kuala Lumpur last week - attended by the foreign ministers of Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, as well as the United Nation's refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration - produced an agreement to provide "temporary" aid for the thousands of people stranded on decrepit boats in the Andaman Sea, softening an earlier "push back" policy that turned away boats from territorial waters. Yet the response, welcome as it was, is nowhere near adequate in dealing with a longstanding problem that has now reached crisis proportions.

The tragedy of "boat people" fleeing everything from abject poverty to political persecution in their homelands - and exacerbated by the scourge of human trafficking - has played out in the South-east Asian and Mediterranean waters for centuries. Now and then, the illegal migrants made news whenever disaster struck at sea. The exodus has escalated in recent years, with the scale of the problem evident more lately after the human traffickers jumped ship in the wake of the Thai authorities' crackdown on smuggling in the seas.